What is search and why will it never work well without real brains in the mix.

What is search ? Search is a question and an answer. Search is a conversation. Search is transient or it persists to notify you of what is new. But here is the real thing search has to start to recognize what brains recognize when they read a piece of text and abstract and organize the content enough that it can be used to answer a question. Everything else is just a hack. So search will have to engage people in some form. People will have to be the intelligence in intelligent search. So the process is to record lots of bits of intelligent activity of millions of people and figure out the patterns. Intelligence is one of those things that science is still trying to define and model, so its not likely that one can record all intelligent activity if you don’t have a way of representing it. One thing that intelligent activity does do is organize things. Organize by any number of criteria in multiple contexts and systems all at the same time. For example, food. Food can be organized based on its impact on health, nutrients etc. It can be organized based on flavors. It can be organized based on the biology of the things it was made from. It can be organized by the chef or by the factory that made it. So if you can intelligently organize things, it will help to intelligently find similar things. And hopefully you can take little pieces of how each person organizes their things and meld it into a whole that can be shared without any centralized library or librarian. Each person’s organization of things is a description of an area of interest and a query into a larger whole.